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Defining Place
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About the lecture
In this module, we think about how geographers define the concept of place, focusing on: (i) some broad themes and variations in common understandings of place, and crucially the idea that place is more than just location – it also includes an emotional component; (ii) Stephen Daniels argument that geographers should not only study specific places, but also “the very idea of place” ; (iii) three key threads in the definition of place – that they are defined by flows of goods and people, that they have meaning, and that they are characterised by change; (iv) the contested nature of ideas about place.
About the lecturer
Professor Richard Phillips is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Sheffield. He researches geographical concepts, fieldwork, and research methods. His publications include Creative Writing for Social Research (2021, co-author), Georges Perec’s Geographies (2019, co-editor), and Fieldwork for Human Geography (2012, co-author)
Hello. My name is Richard Phillips.
00:00:05I'm a professor of human geography at the University of Sheffield.
00:00:07And I'm going to be talking to you today about place and thinking about place, Um,
00:00:11place in general
00:00:15and specific places.
00:00:17And that is the theme of this course that we're doing today on changing places
00:00:18and, uh,
00:00:23in changing places, which is one of the themes of the geography, a level.
00:00:26There's a number of threads and I want to take you through those threads
00:00:29in the different modules that we have coming up.
00:00:33What I want to do,
00:00:35to start with those is to think about is to think about place
00:00:35in a broader sense to open up the threads that will follow later.
00:00:39So place, I think, as geographers,
00:00:43I think I can say as geographers because if you're watching this,
00:00:46you're probably doing
00:00:48a geography, a level or interested in geography, as I am
00:00:49as geographers. I think we're interested in all sorts of things.
00:00:53But perhaps 11 of those that we all share in common
00:00:56is place.
00:00:59Place
00:01:01the places where we grew up, the places where we live, the places where we want to go
00:01:02places that we've heard about and wonder about.
00:01:07I think as geographers we have a really profound interest in place,
00:01:09which is perhaps
00:01:13in some ways the same as as non geographers.
00:01:14But in some ways it's more specific,
00:01:17and it's something that we pursue and we think about
00:01:19in G. C S E.
00:01:23If you did GCSE geography People talk about place as a matter of location,
00:01:24and that's good.
00:01:29And that's appropriate because place does include location, but at a level
00:01:30we want to think about places, something that involves more than location.
00:01:34And I want to try to explain what that is in the module.
00:01:38What I do with students and what you might think about
00:01:41doing yourself if you want to pause this for a moment,
00:01:44is to begin thinking about place by thinking about a place that you like
00:01:47the place that you know,
00:01:51perhaps your favourite place,
00:01:53and just take a few moments
00:01:55to write down a sentence about that place to describe it,
00:01:57you might prefer to draw.
00:02:01Perhaps you're a person that likes drawing more, so to draw that place
00:02:02and maybe write some words around it, annotate it.
00:02:06So take a few moments to do that.
00:02:09This is something that, as I say, I've asked students to do,
00:02:11and it's really interesting seeing the ways in which they respond to that question
00:02:14and to that challenge and and perhaps how I respond to it as well,
00:02:19because one thing that I noticed is that is that some people think about
00:02:23about places which are very small. Perhaps their home or their street
00:02:28for other people are places always something on the scale of a city.
00:02:33It's something larger. It maybe it's the town where they're from
00:02:36even the country where they're from.
00:02:39So place is something that people think about in different scales, and that's okay.
00:02:41We start with where we are and what we know to begin with,
00:02:45Um, but other other variations are there as well, and how people think about place.
00:02:48So one thing that we can see that some people
00:02:53talk much more about places with people in with other people
00:02:55than places which are more natural. Some people talk, for instance, about a street
00:03:00with people or a home with people,
00:03:05others about an island or or or a lake as a place.
00:03:07So we see variations in how that word is used.
00:03:11Another thing that comes through because when I asked
00:03:14you about to think about a place you like,
00:03:16there's already an emotional quality there.
00:03:19There's a sense not just of the place in a physical way,
00:03:21but also a place in terms of how you feel about place,
00:03:25an association you have with place.
00:03:28Perhaps you love the place because you have a nice memory of it.
00:03:30Perhaps it's because it's somewhere you felt secure.
00:03:34Perhaps it's somewhere where you felt loved,
00:03:36so
00:03:39there's an emotional quality to place.
00:03:40So we begin to open up thinking about place,
00:03:42and these are some things that we can take forward.
00:03:44A geographer called Steven Daniel, he's a professor of cultural geography,
00:03:47said that it's not just specific places that geographers study.
00:03:51We all study specific places, such as the ones you may have mentioned,
00:03:55but the very idea of place.
00:03:59So we go from observations of particular places
00:04:01to a broader idea. So this is distilling a broader idea, and this is where we get
00:04:05from thinking about location to something
00:04:10a little bit more conceptually challenging.
00:04:12And so what is the idea of place If Stephen Daniels is talking about the idea of place,
00:04:15he has an idea.
00:04:19Perhaps you have an idea of what a places
00:04:20in a general sense something that encompasses all of those
00:04:22differences that I've mentioned before, of scale of emotion,
00:04:26of of different kinds, of human
00:04:29and physical presence. So
00:04:32you may have an idea of place, but let me take you through,
00:04:34and I'm going to introduce you to this now and then take you through later.
00:04:36A number of different threads about of ideas of place,
00:04:40which are in the geography a level.
00:04:44And
00:04:46these are our threads that I've written about.
00:04:47But I haven't come up with in my own, because these are how geographers,
00:04:49in a broader sense, human geographers think about place.
00:04:52So there are three threads.
00:04:55The first is that place is all about flows. Flows of people of ideas, of information,
00:04:58of goods
00:05:05flows
00:05:06through geography.
00:05:07But those flows stop and concentrate in particular spots.
00:05:09The flows of products stop in a shop
00:05:13in a neighbourhood.
00:05:15People come to the shop and they buy things and they take them back home.
00:05:16That's one flow.
00:05:19We see other kinds of flows and I'll talk about some of the other ones later,
00:05:20but places are all about flows.
00:05:23They're not fixed things.
00:05:25There's already something dynamic and moving about places,
00:05:27secondly, and this is one that might sound a bit challenging at first,
00:05:31but that will get used to
00:05:35is that place
00:05:36encompasses meaning.
00:05:38A geographer called Tim Cresswell spoke about place as a meaningful
00:05:40segment of geographical space,
00:05:44and and there's a there's a famous quotation when we think
00:05:46about place as low as as defined as location plus meaning.
00:05:49So there's something
00:05:53about place that we inscribe.
00:05:55We add meanings to and through the ways that we admit, meaning
00:05:56we turn the space into a place.
00:06:00And then a third point that we want to make about place
00:06:04is that those places might sometimes seem very fixed and very solid
00:06:07places are fundamentally understood as changing.
00:06:11So this segment of the A level is on changing places. Those changes are fundamental
00:06:14to how we think about place. They're changing
00:06:19not just the immediate flows that come through on a daily basis,
00:06:22but a place changing from year to year.
00:06:24Over time,
00:06:27a place changes. We can't hold on to the places that we know because their very nature
00:06:28is to be constantly changing.
00:06:34Elements of that we love are disappearing, and new elements are arriving
00:06:36the same with physical geography.
00:06:40Some of these changes are alarming. Some of them we learn to live with.
00:06:42Those are three themes about about changing places that we need to come back to
00:06:45and investigate more closely.
00:06:50If we wanted to add 1/4 theme,
00:06:52and the fourth theme might be a sort of icing on the cake theme,
00:06:55it's that all of these ideas are contested.
00:06:59There isn't a consensus on what places
00:07:03or what any particular places because different people
00:07:06see places differently
00:07:09and they have different thoughts about the idea of place. So the fourth idea
00:07:12is that places are contested,
00:07:16but we'll keep that as a secondary thought for the moment
00:07:17just before we end this first segment,
00:07:21it's quite helpful to begin to think about the place that I mentioned
00:07:23the place that I asked you to to think about before when
00:07:26I when I mentioned the exercise on a place that you love,
00:07:29think about the place that you love as a place with those four strands.
00:07:33Firstly, the idea of flows.
00:07:37What flows take place if that's your home, what flows come into and out of the home?
00:07:39Or indeed, if it's a a neighbourhood that you've lived in, what flows come in?
00:07:45And what are the timescales that those flows take place within
00:07:49flows of students into certain neighbourhoods in the city, floats of old people
00:07:53moving in or out of the neighbourhood
00:07:57within
00:08:00an in and out of the family home.
00:08:01And then you can think about the other two main themes that I've talked about as well.
00:08:03Ideas of meaning. What meanings do you associate
00:08:07with that place will come back, as I said, and examine what meaning is later.
00:08:10But what meanings do you associate with that with the home with the island,
00:08:15with the whatever your place was
00:08:19with associations and what are those things?
00:08:22And then and then the third main point was how those things change.
00:08:26How does how does that place that you love change?
00:08:29It's not just the flows in and out that are dynamic.
00:08:34It's not just the meanings that begin
00:08:36somewhere and get forgotten and end somewhere.
00:08:39But how is that place changing? How is your home changed.
00:08:41How is that island that you love changed?
00:08:44Um, so there are some interesting introductory thoughts.
00:08:47What we've done in the first segment here is to go from thinking
00:08:50about specific places to what Stephen Daniels called the very idea of place.
00:08:54And at that level, we're challenging ourselves to think a bit more conceptually,
00:08:59which is what happens in a level compared to GCSE
00:09:03and as we go forward from a level, if you do that to university.
00:09:07
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Phillips, R. (2023, March 06). Changing Places - Defining Place [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/options/changing-places-d5784d71-2004-4295-a9a5-1e9af82cf5b5?auth=0&lesson=12890&option=9691&type=lesson
MLA style
Phillips, R. "Changing Places – Defining Place." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 06 Mar 2023, https://massolit.io/options/changing-places-d5784d71-2004-4295-a9a5-1e9af82cf5b5?auth=0&lesson=12890&option=9691&type=lesson